Down the Orinoco in a Canoe

By S. Pérez Triana
With an Introduction by R. B. Cunninghame Graham
‘Que ejcura que ejtá la Noche!
La Noche! que ejcura ejtá!
Asi de ejcura ej la ausencia ...
Bogá, Negrito, bogá,
Bogá!’
Candelario Obeso
New York Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Publishers 1902
‘Climas pasé, mudé constelaciones, golfos inavegables, navegando.’—Ercilla: La Araucana .
To read a book to which a friend has asked you to write a preface is an unusual—nay, even a pedantic—thing to do. It is customary for a preface-monger to look contemptuously at the unopened bundle of his friend’s proofs, and then to sit down and overflow you his opinions upon things created, and those which the creator has left in chaos. I plead guilty at once to eccentricity, which is worse than the sin of witchcraft, for witchcraft at one time may have exposed one to the chance of the stake; but eccentricity at all times has placed one outside the pale of all right-thinking men. To wear a different hat, waistcoat, or collar, from those affected by the Apollos who perambulate our streets, to cut your hair too short, to wear it by the twentieth fraction of an inch too long, is scandalum magnatum , and not to be endured. So in confessing that I have read ‘Down the Orinoco in a Canoe,’ not only in the original Spanish in which it first appeared, but in its English dress, is to condemn myself out of my own mouth, to be set down a pedant, perhaps a palterer with the truth, and at the best a man so wedded to old customs that I might almost be a Socialist.
It is undoubtedly a far cry to Bogotá. Personally, more by good fortune than by any effort of my own, I know with some degree of certainty where the place is, and that it is not built upon the sea. My grandfather was called upon to mediate between Bolivar and General Paez, and I believe acquitted himself to the complete dissatisfaction of them both. Such is the mediator’s meed.